SQL Server Enterprise

A) Licensing All Physical Processors If you license all of the physical processors on the server (one license per physical processor), you may run unlimited instances of the SQL Server software in 4 OSEs (either physical or virtual):

Count all the Physical Procs in the box

You may run unlimited # instances in up to four operating systems environments for each Enterprise license you assign to the server.

Down Edition Rights apply to those Instances.

Alternative to a Physical Processor count – look at the Procs Used:

B) Licensing a Portion of the Physical Processors If you choose not to license all of the physical processors, you will need to know the number of virtual processors supporting each virtual OSE and the number of cores per physical processor/socket. Typically, each virtual processor is the equivalent of one core:

/ # of cores (hyper-threading off)

/ # threads (if hyper-threading on) per physical processor

SQL Server Standard Edition

If you license on the physical processors you may run the software in the physical OSE only.

If you license all of the physical processors on the server (one license per physical processor), you may run unlimited instances of the SQL Server software in 1 Physical OSE.

In order to run the software in Virtual OSEs, you will need to license the number of virtual processors supporting each virtual OSE (See above)

The total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server (1:1)

Failover Rights

For any operating system environment in which you run instances of the server software, you may run up to the same number of passive fail-over instances in a separate operating system environment for temporary support. The number of physical and virtual processors used in that separate operating system environment must not exceed the number of physical and virtual processors used in the corresponding operating system environment in which the active instances are running. You may run the passive fail-over instances on a server other than the licensed server.